The elephant in the room with the NRL's salary cap is TPA's.
When the cap was introduced, the NSWRL's intention was to level the playing field and stop it being like English soccer or Major League Baseball where the rich clubs dominate every year because they can afford the best players. Every club had the same amount of money to spend on their players. It was designed to allow the likes of Wests, Balmain, Illawarra etc to be able to compete with the Manly's, the Easts, the Broncos without going broke in the process.
Then along came the Broncos, News Ltd. and the Super League war where almost overnight even reserve graders salaries went from about $50k to half a million.....and most of it was funded by either News (Murdoch) or Optus (Packer). But while player salaries were a drop in the well for those two, the clubs found it a bit more difficult.
Then the war ended and the NRL was formed. But there was a problem. Clubs, especially those ARL loyal clubs in Sydney, could no longer afford the ridiculous (at the time) player salaries. There were threats, mostly from parasite managers looking at their own bank accounts, that players like Fittler and/or Lockyer would either end up playing in England or would switch to cashed up union who themselves had recently gone professional. A way had to be found for these players to still come under the salary cap (which was re-introduced by the NRL) and yet still be earning what they were, or at least close to what they were, during the split.
Thus we have TPA's which have unfortunately made a mockery of what the salary cap was designed for. Clubs like the Chooks and Broncos suddenly had a massive advantage. They could basically pay their players the minimum salary the NRL valued them at with the rest of the money coming from outside parties (TPA's) while other clubs who had/have less available to them are forced to pay top dollar inside of the cap (which makes the success we've had since then all the more satisfying). We've all heard the stories about some clubs (Brisbane) having virtually double the cap to play with simply because of the TPA's.
The problem is that the NRL is seemingly very reluctant to do anything about it, mostly because the teams with the advantage are also those with the biggest fan bases who also get the highest FTA television ratings. The easiest thing to do IMO would be to put a cap on TPA's which is fair to all clubs. But for some reason the NRL don't seem interested in fixing the problem.
The situation won't change until the NRL do something about capping TPA's available.
